America's Role in a Darkening Age

A weakening European Union has spawned a "resurgence of
nationalism and extremism in ... Hungary, Finland, Ukraine and Greece."

"We are truly in a battle between two epic forces," says Kaplan,
"those of integration based on civil society and human rights, and those
of exclusion based on race, blood and radicalized religion."

How should the United States deal with this darkening age?

"Because values like minority rights are under attack the world
over, the United States must put them right alongside its own exclusivist
national interests, such as preserving a favorable balance of power.

Without universal values in our foreign policy, we have no identity as a
nation -- and that is the only way we can lead with moral legitimacy in an
increasingly disordered world."

But is this not itself utopian?

A great religious awakening is taking place from Morocco to
Mindanao. If these hundreds of millions believe there is no God but Allah
and he has shown the way to eternal life, why would they, why should they,
tolerate pastors and preachers from heretical and false faiths?

How do we preach women's equality -- an easy access to divorce
contraception and abortion -- to people who swear by a sacred book that
says you kill people like that?

How do we preach the blessings of racial and ethnic diversity to
a world where, as Kaplan writes, ethnonationalism and tribalism are being
embraced and people are willing to die to create nations where their own
kind and their own culture are dominant if not exclusive?

Before we put our "values" up there with our vital interests, as
the object of our foreign policy, what exactly are we talking about?
Do Americans in the grip of a social-moral-cultural war even
agree among themselves on "values"?

Our First Amendment protects freedom of speech to call the
Prophet vile names. Our freedom of the press protects pornography. Our
freedom of religion means all religions are to be equally excluded from
public schools.

Other nations believe in indoctrinating their children in their
own beliefs and values. Where do we get the right to push ours in their
societies?

When did the internal affairs of foreign nations become the
portfolio of American diplomats? Did James Madison's first minister to
Russia, John Quincy Adams, demand that Czar Alexander free the serfs?

"Without universal values in our foreign policy, we have no
identity as a nation," says Kaplan.

But that is not our history. America has indeed been about ideas,
but America is now and has always been about more, much more than abstract
ideas.